We drank a coffee together. Vladimir told me what had happened to him back in our new dawn of 1991 when we were promised our freedom.
He had been encouraged to speak out, he told me, as we all were back then in the era of perestroika and glasnost and Yeltsin’s ascent to power. At the Forest they had asked him to voice any concerns about the way the Forest was run, anything at all that struck him as wrong or wasteful or outdated. Foolishly, Vladimir took them at their word. He told his questioners that he thought it was wrong for senior officers to use official cars for their own private business, a common practice in the nineties and today. He was praised for this honesty, and then summoned the following day to his observer’s office, where a lieutenant colonel was waiting for him.
‘We’re sending you to the Cape Verde Islands,’ the officer told him abruptly.
Stunned, Vladimir replied that he didn’t speak Portuguese.
‘Don’t worry,’ the lieutenant colonel told him. ‘We’ll blind you, too, so you won’t be able to see anything either.’
And so Vladimir had spent nearly ten years in Cape Verde, in exile, effectively, doing nothing apart from learning perfect Portuguese. They hadn’t actually blinded him but such a fate as Vladimir’s, I was suddenly reminded, was and still is today the result of the self-defeating vindictiveness of the organisation I work for.
We said goodbye and arranged to meet the following week.
After waiting for nearly two hours for this ‘urgent’ meeting, I was finally called up to Kerchenko’s office.
There were three of them there, including Kerchenko. The other two were the case officers who also worked on Finn’s dossier. Yuri, one of the ‘new KGB’ Russians from Petersburg, lounged in a corner with his feet up as if to make it clear he didn’t take orders from an old-timer like Kerchenko.
I knew Yuri took a cut from a logging business out in northern Siberia and had become rich from the new black market run by the nexus of security officers and mafia buzinessmen.
The other one, Sasha, like Kerchenko an old Brezhnevite, had a lined face and bushy eyebrows. He sat to the side of the room with his elbows on his knees and looked at the floor like a prisoner. The General sat behind the overlarge desk so favoured in former times by self-important bureaucrats.
Before I had even sat down Kerchenko asked me where Finn was. He used our codename for Finn, which was Markus.
I didn’t reply until I’d sat in the empty chair in front of the desk.
‘I haven’t seen him for more than three days,’ I said.
I knew immediately that I was under suspicion; a cross-examination began, questions flew from all three of them, from all sides simultaneously.
I calmly and clearly told them about our last meeting and, in particular, everything that Finn had said about Putin. It was all stuff that was in the report I had made the day after he and I had met. I always made a report after every encounter with Finn.
I recounted Finn’s anxiety and his anger with his own people. I didn’t tell them the whole truth, nothing about his invitation to me to go with him but just enough, I hoped, to manipulate the manipulators who see betrayal and falsehood everywhere. What I really wanted to know was what had caused them to call me in so suddenly, but I concealed my interest in the reasons for their inquiries as well as I could. Of course they weren’t satisfied.
‘Why didn’t you tell us he was leaving Moscow?’ the bald Yuri barked eventually, and simultaneously snapped the buckle of his expensive watch. He looked at me with all the lust of assumed conquest.
My shock was evident.
‘You didn’t know?’ Kerchenko said accusingly.
‘No, I didn’t.’
There was a pause while they watched me.
‘When did he leave?’ I asked, in an attempt at professional, rather than personal curiosity.
‘This morning. On the British Airways flight to London. With two officials from London,’ Kerchenko said.
‘You didn’t know,’ Yuri sneered. ‘You didn’t know.’
I ignored him, looking at the watch on his wrist and thinking how brashly our new officers now wore their illegal wealth.
‘Why didn’t he tell you he was leaving?’ Sasha asked so softly that I could barely hear the question. He still hadn’t looked up from the floor.
‘I don’t know why. He doesn’t tell me everything.’
‘Surely he would tell you something like this,’ Yuri demanded.
‘Yes. Yes, I suppose he would. Normally. So I suppose it must have been a sudden decision.’
‘Of his? Or theirs?’ Sasha asked softly again.
‘I can’t say. Of theirs, I guess. Unless he’s ill, or has family problems.’
‘What was his mood?’ Sasha said from under the bushy eyebrows which were all I could see of his face. It was a question that was asked many times during that afternoon and evening.
‘Just anxious. And, as I said, angry. He was very angry.’
‘Did he say anything unusual to you at this recent meeting?’ Kerchenko asked. ‘Your last meeting. Anything that seemed too unimportant at the time, perhaps, to include in your report?’
I thought for a moment, giving them time to register this moment of contemplation. And then I smiled. It was Finn’s instruction to tell them that made me smile, but they weren’t to know that.
‘What’s so funny?’ Yuri said. ‘You’ve lost a British intelligence officer you’re being paid to stay up close to night and day. What’s so fucking funny?’
‘What he said,’ I replied coolly. ‘That’s what was funny.’
Kerchenko raised his eyebrows and Sasha looked up at last.
‘Well?’ Kerchenko said.
‘He told me he loved me,’ I said.
There was a moment of silence in the room, the first real silence since I’d arrived. For me, it was unnervingly a thing of beauty. Finn had invaded the room. I was thinking only of Finn.
It was Yuri, inevitably, who finally brought me back.
‘That’s funny,’ he said. ‘Falling for our whore.’
‘I am a colonel in the SVR,’ I reprimanded him. ‘I am not your, or anyone’s, whore.’
I looked at Yuri’s face and saw the amorphous hate I’d seen so often in my father’s face. To me it came from a fury that anyone was capable of independent thought.
‘So,’ Sasha said, recapping my words, ‘you said that this was funny.’ I liked Sasha for that.
‘Of course,’ I said. ‘To me it is funny, yes. For a colonel in the SVR to be told by a British intelligence officer that he loves her–yes, that’s funny. He’s been out of control for some time,’ I continued. ‘It’s in my reports. But this was a new low. It seemed such an obvious, ridiculous thing to say to me. Apparently he’s lost it.’
‘And you’ve lost him,’ Yuri said.
‘Why isn’t it in your report that he told you he loved you?’ Kerchenko asked, turning a page in a mannered way so as not to meet my eye. I wanted to laugh at his pomposity next to the question.
‘It meant nothing. It was just one more symptom of his loss of discipline. It’s not an important piece of information.’
‘Maybe you were embarrassed?’ Kerchenko said.
‘Embarrassed, no,’ I replied. ‘Disgusted. It was laughable. As I say, it was a complete collapse of discipline and I’ve reported on his loss of discipline extensively.’
‘Yes,’ the General said heavily. ‘We were hoping you would take more advantage of that than you have. We’ve been expecting some results for some time from his apparent disintegration; something that tells us what he’s been doing in Moscow for so long. Far too long. But now he’s gone.’
‘It’s something that’s been discussed in this room many times,’ I agreed. ‘But on the instructions I was given I didn’t want to alarm him, scare him off. He’s been quite unstable for some time. He could do anything, in my opinion.’